New Age movement, movement that spread through the occult and metaphysical religious communities in the 1970s and ʾ80s. It looked forward to a “New Age” of love and light and offered a foretaste of the coming era through personal transformation and healing. The movement’s strongest supporters were followers of modern esotericism, a religious perspective that is based on the acquisition of mystical knowledge and that has been popular in the West since the 2nd century ad, especially in the form of Gnosticism. Ancient Gnosticism was succeeded by various esoteric movements through the centuries, including Rosicrucianism in the 17th century and Freemasonry, theosophy, and ritual magic in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Origins

In the late 19th century Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, cofounder of the Theosophical Society, announced a coming New Age. She believed that theosophists (who embraced Buddhist and Brahmanic notions such as reincarnation) should assist the evolution of the human race and prepare to cooperate with one of the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood whose arrival was imminent. Blavatsky believed that, as the world’s hidden leaders, members of this mystical brotherhood guided the destiny of the planet. Her ideas contributed to expectation of a New Age among practitioners of Spiritualism and believers in astrology, for whom the coming of the new Aquarian Age promised a period of brotherhood and enlightenment.

Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant, predicted the coming of a messiah, or world saviour, who she believed was the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. In the 1940s Alice A. Bailey, founder of the Arcane School (an organization that disseminated spiritual teachings), suggested that a new messiah, the Master Maitreya, would appear in the last quarter of the 20th century. Bailey also established the “Triangles” program to bring people together in groups of three to meditate daily. Participants in the program believed that they received divine energy, which they shared with those around them, thus raising the general level of spiritual awareness.

After Bailey’s death, former members of the Arcane School created a host of new independent theosophical groups within which hopes of a New Age flourished. These groups claimed the ability to transmit spiritual energy to the world and allegedly received channeled messages from various preternatural beings, especially the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood. For example, Scotland’s Findhorn Foundation believed that its purported contact with a variety of nature spirits produced spectacular agricultural feats, despite the poor soil and climate of the group’s settlement.

As expectations of a New Age increased in the 1960s, a new organization, the Universal Foundation, appeared. Its wealthy leader, Anthony Brooke, traveled widely beginning in the mid-1960s, predicting that an apocalyptic event would occur during the Christmas season of 1967. Although the event never took place, an international network of New Age groups emerged.

While esotericism grew, its major representative, theosophy, suffered significant setbacks. In the 1880s Blavatsky was accused of faking miraculous events associated with her contact with the Ascended Masters. In the early 20th century the Theosophical Society was hurt again, this time by a series of sex scandals involving its leaders, and Besant was personally embarrassed by the defection of Krishnamurti in 1929. Nonetheless, the society was a significant catalyst in promoting public acceptance of the notion of psychic reality and conducted a program to raise awareness of other religious traditions among its members and the predominantly Christian general public.

Birth of the movement

In 1970 American theosophist David Spangler moved to the Findhorn Foundation, where he developed the fundamental idea of the New Age movement. He believed that the release of new waves of spiritual energy, signaled by certain astrological changes (e.g., the movement of the Earth into a new cycle known as the Age of Aquarius), had initiated the coming of the New Age. He further suggested that people use this new energy to make manifest the New Age. Spangler’s view was in stark contrast to that of Bailey and her followers, who believed that the new era would arrive independent of human actions. Spangler’s perspective demanded an active response and shifted the responsibility for the coming of the New Age to those who believed in it.

Returning to the United States in the mid-1970s, Spangler became the major architect of the movement. He presented his ideas in a set of popular books beginning with Revelation: The Birth of a New Age (1976) and attracted many leaders from older occult and metaphysical organizations to the growing movement. The collapsing psychedelic movement also provided new supporters, including spokespersons such as noted psychologist Richard Alpert, who, like Timothy Leary, was an advocate of the use of hallucinogenic drugs to achieve mystical experiences. Alpert, however, found enlightenment in India, and returning to the West as Baba Ram Dass, he disavowed the drug experience and advocated more traditional spiritual disciplines. Simultaneously, periodicals were published to disseminate information and to create a sense of community within the decentralized movement. As the movement grew, bookstores opened that specialized in the sale of New Age books, videos, and meditative aids.

Fundamental ideas

The New Age movement united a body of diverse believers with two simple ideas. First, it predicted that a New Age of heightened spiritual consciousness and international peace would arrive and bring an end to racism, poverty, sickness, hunger, and war. This social transformation would result from the massive spiritual awakening of the general population during the next generation. Second, individuals could obtain a foretaste of the New Age through their own spiritual transformation. Initial changes would put the believer on the sadhana, a new path of continual growth and transformation.

Although most followers of New Age teachings believe that the new era is still to come, Benjamin Crème announced that a world saviour, or Maitreya, would appear in 1982. The initial interest stirred by that prediction waned when the Maitreya failed to appear, but Crème continued to use his organization, Share International, to foretell the saviour’s imminent arrival.

Realizing the New Age

Traditional occult practices (e.g., tarot reading, astrology, yoga, meditation techniques, and mediumship) were integrated into the movement as tools to assist personal transformation. Transpersonal psychology (an approach combining Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism to understand psychological health and spiritual well-being) and other new academic disciplines that study states of consciousness encouraged the belief that consciousness-altering practices (such as Zen meditation) could be practiced apart from the particular contexts in which they originated. Moreover, many other techniques used to achieve personal transformation were enlisted in the effort to bring about “planetary healing” and societal transformation.

The movement also spoke to the sick and psychologically wounded, especially those who had been unable to find help though traditional medicine and psychotherapy. Aligning themselves with the Holistic Health movement—which advocated alternative and natural healing practices such as massage, natural food diets, chiropractic, and acupuncture—believers in the New Age promoted spiritual healing. They also sought the integration of older divinatory practices (astrology, tarot, and I Ching) with standard psychological counseling.

Two transformative tools, channeling and the use of crystals, were identified with the New Age movement as it peaked in the 1980s. Many New Agers discovered their psychic abilities and became known as channels. Either consciously or in a trance, they claimed to establish contact with various preternatural or extraterrestrial entities who spoke through them on a wide range of spiritual, philosophical, and psychological topics. Some of the beings who “spoke” through channels (e.g., Seth, Ramtha, and Lazarus) became popular teachers themselves, and some of the more popular channelers founded new organizations.

Drawing upon the myth of Atlantis, one channeler, Frank Alpert, proposed the use of crystals as healing-transformative tools. He suggested that the ancient civilization had lived off the power of crystals and fell because of its ruler’s unwise and immoral use of them. Crystals were thought to be great reservoirs of energy and distinct healing and of transformative powers that could be released for personal benefit. In the 1980s they were among the most popular items at New Age stores and conventions; however, critics were quick to point out the unscientific nature of the movement’s claims for crystals.

Some members of the movement found support for their belief in their ability to transform world culture in a story about monkeys learning to wash food. According to the story, reportedly taken from the anthropological literature, a number of monkeys learned by example to wash their food. After the 100th monkey had absorbed the lesson, all monkeys jumped ahead in consciousness and started washing their food. The story turned out to be a significant distortion of the scientific report; however, many New Agers believed that if a small critical mass of people adopted the more advanced perspective of the New Age, there would be a sudden explosion of higher consciousness throughout the world. The 100th-monkey idea led to a series of mass gatherings beginning with the Harmonic Convergence, which was a set of coordinated gatherings of people at various places around the world on August 16–17, 1987 that was designed to bring about a leap in human consciousness.

By the end of the 1980s, the New Age movement had lost its momentum. Although primarily a religious movement, it was derided for its acceptance of unscientific ideas and practices (especially its advocacy of crystals and channeling). Then Spangler, Los Angeles publisher Jeremy Tarcher, and the editors of several leading New Age periodicals announced that although they still adhered to the goals of personal transformation, they no longer believed in the coming New Age. By the mid-1990s, it was evident that the movement was dying, and New Agers in Europe began to speak of the move from “New Age to Next Stage.”

The New Age movement proved to be one of the West’s most significant religious phenomena of the 20th century. It improved the image of older esoteric religious groups, which continue to be referred to as the New Age community, and allowed many of its largest groups to find a place in the West’s increasingly pluralistic culture. Although its vision of massive social transformation died, the movement attracted hundreds of thousands of new adherents to one branch or other of the Western esoteric-metaphysical tradition. More than one-fifth of adults in the West give credence to astrology; an equal number have practiced some form of meditation. Three to five million Americans identified themselves as New Agers or as accepting the beliefs and practices of the New Age movement in the late 1980s. The continuing presence of New Age thought in the post-New Age era is evident in the number of New Age bookstores, periodicals, and organizations that continued to be found in nearly every urban centre.

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a loose conglomeration of beliefs and products that emerged in the 1980s; various facets include: reevaluation of traditional non-Western religious beliefs, environmental concerns, using crystals as a spiritual medium, channeling-communicating with nonmortal entities; spurred a flood of products, including books, music, seminars, and retreats; found focal point in 1987’s Harmonic Convergence celebration; notable proponent, author and actress Shirley MacLaine.